To think that charities should be better at saying thank you? A donor's lament.

[FreshFreesias]

Some years ago I set up a Trust that makes substantial donations to small and medium animal charities and I am often disappointed to rarely be thanked or acknowledged. Of course, I don’t donate to receive a pat on the back, but it is distressing to receive a generic printed-out thank you form for a 5 figure donation, to have my name misspelt or even, bizarrely, have my bank thanked in a charity’s annual report rather than the Trust.

There is rarely any follow up describing how a donation was spent and what value it has created.

What charities don’t understand is that if they take the time to build up personal relationships with their donors, especially their large donors, they will be ahead of the pack and we will continue to donate to them and remember them in our wills.

I once made a 10k donation to a respected medium-sized charity and in a note with the cheque said I would like to be more involved with elephant and dolphin conservation. I got a lovely note back from the CEO, who I have met before, asking me to contact his secretary to organise a meeting. I’m not sure why the secretary couldn’t contact me herself but never mind. So I duly emailed the secretary and never heard anything back.

Astonishingly, given this tawdry treatment, (I was so upset on discovering that African baby elephants were being torn from their herds to sell to Chinese zoos and this charity specialises in zoo welfare), I contacted the CEO again, pledging 20k to kick start a campaign about this. Again he emailed me, copying in his (presumably very busy) secretary, saying she would contact me to organise a meeting, but she never did. Presumably they are so overwhelmed with large donations, they couldn’t be bothered to follow up mine.

I've had more luck with small rescue charities in Europe, who maintain regular contact, make us feel we are doing something worthwhile and are making a difference.

AIBU to think that charities should spend as much time thanking and building relationships with donors as they do in crafting their appeals for dosh?

We sent non perishable food to the food bank
They wanted money for vans to distribute

This is perfectly understandable, no? They thanked you for the donation of food but presumably tried to steer you towards giving the equivalent donation in cash next time, because that’s what they need to allow the charity to run. Where exactly is the problem.

Generally speaking food banks collecting food donations rather than money is a terribly inefficient way of going about things, but people like to give something that feels ‘tangible’ so the model persists. It’d be better for the charity if everyone who put a tin of beans or a bag of pasta at the supermarket collection point gave the equivalent in cash.

You are 100% correct op. Yet when a charity agrees with you and employs a skilled stewardship professional to nurture relationships with donors like you, meet and talk about projects and work towards asking for the next 5 figure sum, the whole of mumsnet howls in outrage that a charity should dare spend money on staff.

Couldn’t agree more!

Perfectly understandable that OP wants the thanks and engagement (and the charities are foolish not nurture high value donors) but OP is basically asking for more money to be spent on ‘admin costs’.

As a contrast, an aunt of ours left a huge sum (over £100,000) to a medium size charity. The estate / executor didn’t even get an acknowledgement, let alone any thanks! I was a volunteer at the charity. I chased and chased the CEO asking for an acknowledgment (they has cashed the big cheque, they had the funds). No proper response just a brush off. Rude.

Absolutely. Charities have all of the lovely fluffy adverts about how appreciative they'd be if you'd be so kind as to remember them in your will 'when the time finally comes'. But as soon as you sign up, most of them see your house (or whatever percentage you bequeath them) as their property and you as an obstacle to their getting their hands on it. The minute you die, your executors become their new obstacle to getting their cash - not as the nearest and dearest of their generous benefactor. The money is now theirs, from a dead person who can now be forgotten and ignored, so why ever would they dream of thanking you?.

They'll put your house in their 'pending' portfolio, keep regular tabs on its estimated rising market value and also on you. They'll likely have formulae of your age and how long they're statistically likely to have to wait until you die. Often, they'll send you a Christmas card every year - not to express their gratitude at your generous gift, but in the hope that, one year, they'll receive it back as undeliverable; then they'll do some investigating and hope you might have recently died, in which case they'll go full steam ahead, putting huge pressure on your grieving family/executors to sell the house as quickly as possible and will expect them to justify the price they managed to achieve, just in case they didn't manage to get as much as the charity expected - even if only 5% or whatever of the proceeds are theirs.

Needless to say, they'll also expect their full share first as the top priority and likely calculated gross, before all solicitor's, probate and tax costs are taken off. If challenged on their behaviour, they'll outright state that it's their duty to maximise their income and to protect their assets as much as they can. Yep, they only see it as their asset - not your lovely DM's extremely kind gift to them.

If you want to give money to a charity in your will, NEVER give them a percentage of your estate, always a fixed amount. Ideally, don't put it in your will at all - make your wishes known to your children and ask them to make the donation in your memory in their own time and when they're fully ready to do so.

Is it your money you are donating?

I work for a charity. Everyone is paid peanuts and has far to much to do. However we always make a pint of writing letters to thank all donors. And I would have thought the CEO would have made sure that large donations like yours were followed up personally and not just left to his secretary.

The OP's donation was followed up personally by the director? He emailed her!

The secretary didn't follow up on the OP's demand to run a pet project.

Having worked with a few charities over the years, I can say YABVU.

Charities lately have been fulfilling basic state functions. Grant contracts each have their own very detailed reporting and accountability programmes, so you have these enormous reporting duties in addition to just trying to do the work you're commissioned to do. In the face of huge demand.

Yes donors should be thanked. But you have been thanked!

This. You have been thanked - not sure quite what else you'd be after, though it sounds like you want to be hands-on with this charity and know all about their projects/be involved in deciding what projects they do and therefore have a hand in steering their business plan (you say you want a follow up describing how a donation was spent and what value it has created? and about meeting to discuss a potential new project based on something you read about) - in which case you need to volunteer to be a trustee if you have the skills and ability.

Donors do not and should not have the amount of influence you seem to be wanting. If you want to know precisely what they spend your donation on, you need to be clear about that upfront and ask them to restrict the funds (but for a project which is something they are already doing) - though for small and medium charities particularly, unresticted funds are the most useful.

It sounds as though you want them to treat your donations as a grant, with all the relationship building and follow up. The kind of follow up/reporting you seem to want can take considerable time, which of course means money. I'd rather my donations were used for what they were intended rather than on staff time trying to accommodate my own wants.

People are up in arms when charities spend "too much" on admin. This is exactly that.

I have worked for lots of charities in the UK - some small & operating in a very hand to mouth kind of way; others larger national brands with TV advertising campaigns and ‘merchandise’ (logo-ed clothes, stationery, etc).

The larger charities are more likely to have dedicated fundraising teams with time to spend courting donors. At the last charity I worked, an admin assistant in the fundraising team had a take-home salary of £21,000. That £21K would obviously cost the charity more when you add on employer’s obligations - pension, sick-pay, the computer such letters are being sent from, etc. So, a 5-figure donation from one donor would potentially cover the costs of employing a member of staff whose job it is to send out thank-you letters to donors.

Charities like individual, private donors as the money donated is usually unrestricted - that means the charity can usually spend it how it wants with minimal reporting necessary. Sometimes, the donor will specify the area of work where the money is to be spent, but that’s about it.

Money which is received in a grant form from a donor (usually an organisation) will come with restrictions - or ‘gobbledegook’ as described by the OP. Part of those restrictions mean that the charity needs to report - usually quarterly but sometimes monthly - back to the grant giver to explain exactly how that money has been spent and what impact it has had.

Some grant providers prefer facts and figures (quantitative data) and others prefer stories and narratives (qualitative data). Pulling together a report can take day or two each month, depending on the nature of the work. And it needs someone close to the work itself to do it. So an admin assistant in the fundraising team is unlikely to be close enough to know enough detail to do this.

However, in a small place, the same person may be having to juggle the lot - thanking private donors and writing grant reports and actually running the projects the money has been donated to - so, which of these is to be prioritised?

“As a contrast, an aunt of ours left a huge sum (over £100,000) to a medium size charity. The estate / executor didn’t even get an acknowledgement, let alone any thanks! I was a volunteer at the charity. I chased and chased the CEO asking for an acknowledgment (they has cashed the big cheque, they had the funds). No proper response just a brush off. Rude.”

Hmmm I’m in 2 minds about this. It’s not possible to thank the donor in this case- and not sure why the family would get a thank you as it wasn’t their donation? Unless I’m missing some etiquette. That said in the unusual situation that you worked for them (If they knew you/ were aware of that) I think they probably should’ve acknowledged your loss.

@Sockypuppet I do understand what your qualitative and quantitative reporting comment meant. It was still a lot of pointless wank and you know it

Well it is certainly "pointless wank" but you can't opt out of it, if you want to keep serving your beneficiaries.

No, you were just trying to wank at the OP. In the rest of the world we just call it “writing a report” and get on with it.

But it's not just "writing a report" if you have multiple funders requesting the same data in eight different formats.

The OP was all miffed that the charities' staff after thanking her personally for her donation didn't drop everything to cater to her unreasonable demands.

At work we set up a food collection for local food bank & people donated

We received a thank you letter requesting no further food, but money donations

We all decided to stop donating

This is so depressing.

At work we set up a food collection for local food bank & people donated
We received a thank you letter requesting no further food, but money donations
We all decided to stop donating

But why? Why not donate money for the distribution van instead if that’s what they need?

I’ve work as a professional fundraiser for 13 years. I currently manage the fundraising team at a small-medium sized charity.

The best fundraising practice is relational, rather than transactional. I want my donors to feel good about giving to my cause. Ensuring that they feel appreciated will ensure that they give again and when they do, they may give more.

A five figure sum would result in a call from our CEO in our case.

Our best donors are the ones who will call and ask what we need. But they only do that because we’ve taken the time to get to know them.

Problem is that for everyone who wants a big thanks, there is someone else who says "I didn't donate for it to be spent on thank yous".

They can't win here.

These are public accounts & governance documents of a small-medium animal charity.

The have some further info on their own website.

What information is not there that people want?

One reason I set up charity auctions on Ebay is that I DON'T get any thank yous, or further solicitations, or nagging for more. The recipients are totally clueless who I am. I love the anonymity. Bliss.

I'm not donating 5 figures. I could imagine, if I did have tens of thousands, I'd try to donate that in small chunks to very many so also got no acknowledgement which actually means no follow up hassle.

I have experience of the sector and this is an area fraught with complexity.

I admire people who give, who have the imagination to step outside their own immediate life and actually take steps to remedy some of the wrong in the world. But our reactions to tragic disasters show us, time after time, that people want to give in the way that pleases them rather than what the recipients might actually need. People often want to send something personal (food, clothes, toys etc) rather than money. I sometimes wonder what happened to the mountain of old clothes donated after the Grenfell disaster - at one point it was swamping the services and actually hindering people from supporting those in need. Or people raise questions (even express outrage) when the recipients turn out to be mixed, fallible characters - like all the rest of us. They might have more money than the donators thought, want help in a different form, have a chequered past or dare to not be sufficiently grateful.

This does not refer to the OP, but to me this whole question of donations brings to mind the part of Jane Eyre where the benefactor and his daughters tour Jane's school (quasi orphanage). They want to see humble, plainly dressed girls with subdued plaited hair, but are aghast to see that one of the girls has natural auburn curls, flowing exuberantly from her head. So they ask the headteacher for her hair to be cut short, because she isn't conforming to their ideas of what recipients should be/do.

I feel that if you give, it is best to give freely and place no expectations on the recipient.

Spot on @MaybeDoctor

We sent non perishable food to the food bank
They wanted money for vans to distribute

Which sounds perfectly reasonable.

*These are public accounts & governance documents of a small-medium animal charity.

The have some further info on their own website.

What information is not there that people want?*

That’s not a small charity!!!! It’s an £11m income. A small charity has an income of less than £1M. It’s the bigger end of a medium sized charity

If I donate, I want the donation to be used effectively. I want the charity to be well run and accountable. I don't care about thanks. I'm not donating to make myself feel good or get a pat on the back, so why would I care about thanks and recognition?

Not thanking a donor of any amount is not on. Most charities with fundraisers would reach out on receipt of a five-figure sum.

That said, the attitudes on here are hugely disrespectful of charity workers - that they're wasteful, inefficient, greedy etc.

Charity workers know their job better than you do. Their purpose is to receive donations, seek to increase income and apply it as well as they can. They deserve a reasonable salary.

There's a really Victorian attitude that charity workers should be grovelling and living off gruel the whole time, it's awful. It's a power trip by donors.

Great post @MaybeDoctor

I think it’s a combination of people wanting to do something which feels like an immediate/obvious fix (if someone is hungry, give them food, if they are cold, give them a blanket) and people wanting the ‘feel good’ rather than donating selflessly.

It’s all perfectly understandable (and exactly how I used to behave until I started working in the charity sector and seeing things from a different perspective). It is a real challenge for those of us who work in the sector too as we know that perpetuating the narrative of ‘buy a gift for this sad-eyed child’ will get the donations rolling in.